So there aren't many drugs. But sex and rock and roll prove overwhelming
enough preoccupations for the boys and girls at the center of Spring
Awakening, the new musical at the Atlantic Theater Company. Forget about
the youthful innocence of yesteryear (assuming it ever actually existed):
This coterie of 14-year-olds is growing up quickly, without many illusions
about these being the best years of their lives.

Abuse. Trouble in school. Suicide. And, of course, their sexual
awakenings, replete with masturbation, abortion, sex in hay lofts, and
homosexuality. All operating, of course, under the oppressive strictures of
adults who just don't understand what it's like to be young today. Good
times!

The more things change, the more they... You know the rest. As every
generation experiences growing pains like these, much of what happens here
won't prove that revelatory. The apparent hope of librettist-lyricist
Steven Sater and composer Duncan Sheik, who have adapted this predictable
but polished angst-rock musical from Frank Wedekind's scandalous 1891 play
of the same name, is to hold a mirror to today's youth and reassure them
that they are not alone. (And, one imagines, induce them to buy the cast
recording certain to be on the way soon.)

But for all the literalization and simplification to which Sheik and
especially Sater have subjected Wedekind's original work, their creation is
not unsuccessful. Their completely affectionate, mostly unflinching, and
usually serious look at 10 students in a dictatorial German school pounds with
cleverness, originality, and understanding that make this a work not easily
laughed off by Wedekind devotees - who, let's face it, aren't the intended
audience anyway.

What's inexplicably missing is edge. As written, and as directed like a
university rock concert by Michael Mayer, events never satisfyingly evoke
the constraining prison of physical, emotional, and sexual growing pains
that was the lifeblood of Wedekind's play. Instead, this Spring Awakening
suggests how John Hughes might have treated the material had he made a
teen-film adaptation of it in the mid 1980s. (One performer, John Gallagher
Jr., even bears a frightening resemblance to an adolescent Anthony Michael
Hall.)

It's all but demanded we sympathize with friends Moritz (Gallagher) and
Melchior (Jonathan Groff), who share their sparks of interest in girls as
freely as their troubles with classes. The mother of their classmate Wendla
(Lea Michele) so rapturously avoids giving her daughter a true sex talk when
prodded that her refusals take on the unduly Puritanical echoes of certain
characters in The Crucible. Stir things up a bit - Melchior educates the
paternally persecuted Moritz about sex in writing, then Wendla in a more
direct way - and you've got all the makings of a revolution that will either
take control or be quietly stamped out.

Yet this isn't quite The Breakfast Club: Given the morals of Wedekind's era
and his status as a pioneer of German Expressionism, there's little doubt as
to the outcome. The question is whether the journey will be worthwhile.
Musically, it is: Alternative-rock guru Sheik has a gift for plangent,
declarative melodies that meet and upend traditional rock expectations while
conveying feeling with an unadorned, stark simplicity. There's no question
that these characters, locked in an 1891-2006 time warp, would think in
musical terms like these.

But while the lyrics nicely complement the tunes, creating numbers that
throb with unexpected irony and emotional acuity (one number, for Melchior
when the teachers discover his sex treatise, is titled "Totally Fucked"),
the proceedings as Sater has scripted them are shockingly shallow. You get
no sense of these kids' places in the overarching human struggle, and a
completely revamped ending (eliminating a crucial character and a half dozen
cosmic overtones) discards as worthless the larger questions so central to
Wedekind.

The characters have been similarly dumbed down, their motivations rendered
much like transparent playing cards. But with the exception of the
wild-haired Gallagher, as strained, unconvincing, and flat-out creepy as the
expectation-laden Moritz as he was as the guilt-laden high-schooler in last
season's Rabbit Hole, the performers bring considerable grace and
intelligence to their roles. Groff is achingly believable as a man trapped
in a boy's body, a well-groomed alleycat with both a rebellious streak and a
nesting instinct. Michele finds the fading girl in the preternaturally
immature Wendla, if she overplays her innocence at key points.

The other kids, including Brian Johnson as an overweight boy, Skylar Astin
as sexed-up, nerdy piano player, and Lilli Cooper as a girl with a violent
secret, movingly embody their troubles without trying too hard. The weakest
links are Frank Wood and Mary McCann, who play all the adults with attitudes
too knowing, distant, and affected to register as predatory authority
figures. But isn't that strangely appropriate for a show that exists
because adults and children usually behave as though speaking two entirely
different languages?

Sater and Sheik will have little trouble themselves communicating with
intrepid young theatregoers; they won't just speak to them, they'll shout
with megaphones. But for all their vivid, adventurous work, they're
ultimately saying too many unsurprising things in too many unsurprising
ways. Those in their teens and early 20s will get Spring Awakening, but
might still walk away thinking it the product of adults too far removed to
truly, intimately understand them.